Commerce on the Internet is set to account for a significant portion of overall global commerce in the years to come. Conventional selling models such as fixed price sales, auctions and double auctions are currently used for transactions on the Internet. Auctions fall somewhere between the fixed price and double auction mechanisms, fulfilling the buying and selling of unique items in situations where there is a single seller and multiple potential buyers or vice versa. Such items cannot be sold by double auction as the items are unique, nor by a fixed price mechanism because the demand for, and ‘real’ value of, such items are often not known and need to be discovered. The concept of selling items through auctions is intended to create the maximum surplus possible (by sale of an item to the highest bidder) and simultaneously discover the item's competitive price. The competitive price is that price, for the auctioneer, which is the highest prices that any bidder would be willing to pay given the competition and, for the winning bidder, is the lowest price at which the item can be secured.
The advent of online auctions has greatly assisted in improving the popularity of auctions as significant disadvantages associated with traditional auctions are overcome. Most notably, the requirement of simultaneous physical presence of the participants (auctioneer and bidders) at the same geographic location is no longer necessary. A significant amount of work has taken place over the past few years in respect of online auctions and this is reflected by the number of existing Internet auction web sites and relevant patents.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,896, issued on 10 Nov. 1998 to Fisher and Kaplan, describes a system for conducting a multi-person interactive auction over a computer or communications network. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 5,890,138, issued on 30 Mar. 1999 to Godin and Lymburner, describes a system for conducting online ascending and descending price cautions over a communications network. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 6,026,383, issued on 15 Feb. 2000 to Ausubel, describes another method and system for conducting an online auction, wherein the prices paid by bidders are independent of the bidder's own bids and the confidentiality of high bid values is maintained.
Bidding in an online auction typically extends over a long period, ranging from several hours to a number of days. To eliminate the need of human bidders continuously monitoring the auction's status over the entire bidding period, online auctions typically provide the facility of proxy bidding. For example, the auction web eBay™ (http://www.eBay.com) provides a facility whereby a bidder can specify the maximum amount that the bidder is willing to pay in a specified auction. This specified amount is submitted to an auction site which acts as a proxy bidder for the human bidder and bids up to the specified maximum amount. If other bidders outbid this maximum value before the end of the auction, the bidder loses the item. If not outbid, however, the bidder becomes the winner of the item and the final price paid could well be less then the specified maximum amount (value) that the bidder was willing to spend.
A similar proxy bidding facility for an online auction is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,044,363, issued on 28 Mar. 2000 to Mori et al. Further, U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,398, issued on 1 Feb. 2000 to Ausubel, describes an online auction system which is coupled with multiple user (bidder) systems, wherein the bidder systems can receive bid-related information from a bidder and use the information to bid in a multi-round auction conducted by the auction system. The bidder systems, in this instance, are specific to the given auction system and the role of each bidder system is limited to bidding in the specific auction for which the bidder provides the bid-related information.
As can be seen, the above methods and systems continue to make use of conventional auction and bidding models in which a bidder, or an agent representing the bidder, can participate in only one auction at a time. In the physical auctions this was necessary due to the need for the bidder to be physically present in each auction. The many possibilities which the nature of electronic auctions present have not been explored in any depth.
Suppose a bidder wishes to purchase a single item from amongst multiple similar items offered on independent auctions. In the existing models of proxy bidding, the proxy bidder (agent) has to select a particular item to bid for and cannot change the item selected, based on the progress of various auctions. From the auctioneer's perspective, since the proxy bidders have to select the items to bid for, before bidding starts, the number of bidders competing for any given item are restricted. This is because the methods and systems provided for proxy bidding in online auctions are only capable of bidding in a single auction, at any given time, and a bidder cannot be expected to continuously monitor a large number of independent auctions. No existing proxy bidding model for online auctions provides for bidding in multiple simultaneous auctions and the consequent allocation of items and determination of the competitive prices of the items.
The requirement of a proxy system for selecting between alternatives also exists in many other contexts. In the context of electronic commerce, a relatively simpler problem is addressed by U.S. Pat. No. 5,926,7298, issued on 20 Jul. 1999 to Carter. According to its teaching, a client system issues an online commercial request which can be served any of a number of servers. The agent decides on which server to send the request to, based on information contained in the request and the cancellation (request withdrawal) related policies of the various servers. It is noted that this is a one-time decision and depends only on the information contained in the client's requests and the policies of the servers. The issue of resolving selection in auctions presents a much more complicated scenario, where the selections also depend on the actions of a plurality of bidders and may need to be made several times over as the conditions change over time.
It is an object of the present invention to provide software-based agent enabled dynamic auction participation for bidding in multiple simultaneous online auctions that substantially overcomes or at least ameliorates one or more deficiencies of existing arrangements.